Thursday, June 3, 2010

well hmmm...

A couple of weeks ago, I underwent a phone interview at midnight my time. It was uncomfortable to say the least and not far from intimidating. I have yet to come up with a time that I felt so judged and the one time I have been able to comparably recollected from the file folder of my mind labeled, "This is what it feels like to be judged so don't do it to others" is the time I found myself apart of "the white girls" dancing in a circle in the dead center of a non-white filled gymnasium to crude...I mean fresh...tunes. The phone interview was rigid, dry, and full of implied criticism. The total spent was an hour and a half...I believe, though it felt like it consumed my entire night and ended when the sun woke up. The first part of the interview was spent reviewing my entire application. I got the feeling that their intentions were coupled with making sure that it was really Quinlin on the other end of the line and also to make sure I had been honest on the application. During the initial portion of the interview, kept waiting to be asked to raise my right and and solemnly swear and then fed a load of legal jargon but never was, of course. At the point of sweat-filled palms and far-from-pleasant-smelling armpits, we then moved on to the "general questions" portion of the interview. Had the judgments been chocolate, this interview have been delicious because they were spread thick. I was asked to talk about personal situations I'd had with students, about behavior discipline, about teaching philosophies, about my tattoos (how many, where they are, how large they are, what they're of, why), etc. The constant "mmhmm...mmhhmmm..mm" in the back ground coming out of the interviewer's sealed lips distracted my line of thinking and had me skeptical on whether that was a prompt to hurry up and shut up or was an understanding. She asked me to slightly modify my submitted lesson plan to make it fit their general standards a bit more. I did so with no problem. She provided me with some information and said I would hear back a couple of days after my modified lesson plan was submitted.

When it was finally all over, I hung up feeling shaken but confident.

I heard back from my recruiter a few days later with the bad news. I was not offered a position because of my ADHD. The reason given was that my mental condition was a worry to them. I was frustrated, angered, saddened, and many more things.

Currently, I am working with my recruiter to find an alternative to get me over to Korea to teach English.

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